A Conservative Revolutionary Economic Proposal: Making the Economy More Just

By Stephen Yearwood
Guest Columnist

Part I of this series of articles made the case for the conservatism of this proposal. Now for the revolutionary parts of it, with the issue of justice first. 

I wrote in Part I that the purpose of this proposal is to make the economy more just. Any other outcomes are really beside the point.

In thinking about these matters it occurred to me that people seem to agree that political democracy is a just political process. (The political process is the process of effecting choices—choosing among possible alternatives and taking action to bring that choice to fruition—for the community, geopolitical unit, as a whole.) So in this country we have a republican form of government within a democratic political process: the offices of government in fact form the functional core of that process. 

Of course, when we think of democracy we think of ‘equality’: everyone getting the same. As an approach to making the economy more just I dismissed that out of hand. I did not have to think about it to understand that even trying to come up with a workable, functioning economy based on ‘everyone having the same amount’—of anything—could be anything but an exercise in futility. 

I kept thinking, though, and it occurred to me that democracy isn’t actually about equality in that sense. It’s about citizens having the rights necessary to participate in the political process. 

Those rights are part of the political system. That is, they are part of the set of institutions that form the structure in which the political process takes place—like the economic system is the institutional structure in which the economy (the process of producing/acquiring goods/services) takes place. 

Possessing those rights is necessary to be able to participate in that system. A person can act politically without having those rights, but in a just—democratic—system all citizens have all of those rights except for legitimate restrictions on them. 

A universal entitlement to political speech is necessary for all citizens to be able to participate in the political process. For that reason, freedom of political speech is, technically, beyond a ‘right,’ exists beyond the political system. It is its own ‘condition of justice’ for a just political process. 

Otherwise, all political rights can be legitimately restricted. To be legitimate, those restrictions have to be universally applicable and universally applied. That’s what makes those restrictions, therefore the political system, therefore the political process ‘democratic.’ 

The only restriction that meets that standard without any question is age. Restrictions based on gender, race/color of skin/ethnicity, and creed (ideology or theology) have all been found in this nation to violate that standard. (Being a felon and being too mentally incapacitated are potentially universal—we are all susceptible to becoming one or the other, if not both—but are not universal in the indisputable way age is.) 

I then considered that money is to the economy as rights are to the political process. Just like (setting speech aside) rights are necessary to participate in the political process, money is necessary to participate in the economy. (Liberty, as the freedom to do whatever is not illegal, is a ‘condition of justice’ for a just economy.) 

It is possible to produce/acquire goods/services without money, just as it is possible to act politically without rights, but by any reasonable standard, meaningful participation in the economy requires money. So, to have a just economy every adult citizen must have (potential) access to a minimum income. (It might be argued that money was not always as necessary as it is today, but even if so, that was then and this is now.) 

Citizens who are old enough may or may not avail themselves of the opportunity to exercise their political rights, but any citizen who lives long enough becomes eligible for all political rights. Similarly, a ‘democratically distributed income’ is one for which any adult citizen could become eligible, whether particular citizens who were or could become eligible for it chose to avail themselves of it or not. 

That was my reasoning for how to make the economy more just. The next question, for me, was how that could be accomplished in a way that would itself be just as well as practicable and feasible. “Feasible” would include being politically doable and economically sensible. 

All that leaves out, as far as I was concerned, accomplishing that using taxes/public debt. That meant, as I saw it, looking deeper into the economic system, the institutional structure of the economy, to find a way to get it done. If that were not possible a different system would be required for a more just economy. Fortunately, I found that a different system would not be necessary. 

The existing economic system will be the topic of Part III of the series.